Thursday Thoughts - I might have only one match but I can make an explosion

1. I'm at a very disorganized point in my life right now and it feels so far out of my comfort zone and not in a good way like yay you are really out there outside of your comfort zone living your most fearless life. More like you have gone too far out in the ocean and you will die out there alone, thirsty, tired, and when found people will talk about how you were pulled in in dirty underwear. I'm looking to spend some of Sunday getting shit under control. I hope MFD knows I'm serious when I say the boxes I've mentioned to him like 50 times are getting thrown out. This man must forget that I once got so pissed at his dishes in the sink that I put that shit on a tray and left it out on the front stoop for him to either step over or deal with when he got home. Crazy can work if you work it.

2. Tuesday morning at 3:50 am I fell on my goddamn knee carrying the puppy up the stairs. The same knee that was giving me grief all weekend, the same knee which has never given me grief before in life. By 7 am I had pulled my lower back lifting Gus up from the side. By 8 am I decided to work from home in lieu of hobbling around like a dick and carrying a backpack around the city. Forty year old bodies are not as elastic as 25 year old bodies.

3. I have cried four times over Geege this week. Short unexpected bursts of tears. I think it might be like that forever? I don't know. I do know the puppy is helping me heal. I think he's helping all of us. Things I forgot about puppies: how much they pee and bite and the tremendous energy they expend in a short period of time before falling asleep at the drop of a hat.

4. Every once in a while I re-realize most of my Instagram is dog photos. I'm that person and I'm not going to stop being that person. Although recently my pictures are shit because the camera on my phone is not working well.

5. I lost my fucking mind over this this week. This Harvey Weinstein thing has provided the perfect example of systemic misogyny and rape culture from all angles. From men wondering why Hillary has a problem with this because hey her husband got his dick sucked in the oval. From women. Oh yes, women too were raised under this system and society has taught us to forgive or explain away the behavior of men at all costs. Regardless of who you are, if your first instinct is to ask why a victim didn't do something in response to harassment or abuse or assault or rape, you're doing it wrong and I hope someone who hears you victim blaming lights you UP. The focus should be on the behavior of the attacker. NOT the victim. And definitely not other women - we do not get to blame Harvey's wife for not knowing and we do not get to blame Hillary Clinton for not making a statement quickly enough or for taking campaign donations from him. And we do not get to say BUT EVERYONE KNEW especially those Obamas and Clintons and act like they're assholes for doing nothing. Well, not to poke a stick at a sore, but we all know trump is a sexual abuser and it didn't stop nearly 63 million of you from voting for him to be POTUS, so...

Everyone says oh my gosh this should never happen to women / I'm for women. Are you? If you are, let's spend our time talking about how this stops. Opening your eyes and seeing how it is not even just the actual act of rape or abuse itself but the attitudes we hold towards victims and women in general. Men act horribly and we turn our attention to women who should have spoken up or done something or known or or or. We put victims on trial and our first instinct is not to believe them. We  ask women to answer for the behavior of men. Misogyny is so deeply ingrained in people (women included) that our first impulse is to find ANY way we can to hang a man's terrible behavior on a woman. It comes out about this man's horrible past with women in the workplace and we're talking about who accepted his campaign donations instead of, you know, how to stop it from happening in any work place? It's the same as telling women not to walk alone at night instead of telling men not to prey on women who are alone on the street at night.

Rape culture is all around us. It is anyone talking about sex or rape and interspersing the terms as if they are the same. It is politicians in this country using terms like "legitimate rape" when trying to legislate women's bodies and not being immediately removed from office or even remarked upon by most of the population. It's the people who tell her she must have misunderstood something for a sexual advance in the workplace. It's people who infer she asked for it. It's people who ask what she was wearing or if she had too much to drink or if she said no loud enough. It's mothers who blame girls for posting sexy selfies and luring their boys into sex instead of talking with boys about their responsibility. It's teaching girls to say no and teaching boys no means no but not talking or teaching consent. It's calling victims liars right off the bat and accusing them of wanting money or to ruin someone's career or life. It's rape jokes. It's brushing off tales of sexual assault as locker room talk. It's assuming that false reporting for sexual assault is the norm, not the exception. It's feeling less safe on the street at night as a woman. Etc etc etc. It is way more than the act itself. And for those ladies out there like me, who haven't had many personal encounters with this shit, let me remind you - none of us are equal and safe until all of us are equal and safe. We must use our voices to amplify those who cannot speak for themselves right now. We must raise a generation of daughters without the small cuts to their psyches. We must raise a generation of sons we don't subject to toxic masculinity.

6. I'm not going to go nuts on the birth control shitshow because I just put all my money down on #5, but I'll just leave this here and say if you've never struggled choosing to spend $50 on either birth control or food for a week or two in a month here and there (or every month), that's privilege. Recognize it and stop acting like bitches are complaining over nothing because the trump administration will allow employers to choose to cover it or not. Also, can I say I'm fucking sick of men weighing in on this? Seriously? Shut the fuck up. Also, this is a slippery slope, guys. Maybe it's against a company's religion to cover mental health services. Or vaccines. Or or or. You get it.

7. This leaves me too tired to discuss pence's divisive rage stoking publicity protest stunt costing the taxpayers a zillion dollars, the fact that I wish trump and pence cared as much about actual American ideals as they do about symbols of those ideals, my feeling that Tillerson and trump are actors in Billy Madison with the freaking IQ challenge, the time I spent WTFing over the fact that Congress found time to pass an abortion ban after they let CHiP expire, and my intense disgust and rage over trump's self-defeating EPA repealing the clean power plan that was good for absolutely everyone living and breathing just because a black president put it into place. Hold my hoops, I need to put several hexes on people.

8.  Since some people are still not getting it about the protesting: It is every single person's right to demonstrate against racism. The sooner we recognize systemic racism, the sooner we move towards a better life for all of us. Fellow white people, stop resisting this. We are all racist in some way because we live within a systemically racist society. None of us are perfect and we are not expected to be. But we are expected to recognize how society is working unfairly, help to dismantle that system, and move the fuck over to make room at the table for other people who are not white and who are not male. Giving other people the same rights we have always had does not take our rights away. Why are we so threatened?

9. Reminder:

10. E-card of the week:

Have an extra $5 or $10 this week? Help Puerto Rico. Who has a solid charity or group doing work on the ground for people affected by the fires on the left coast? Anyone?

And of course a happy belated National Coming Out day. People are people and love is love. Carry on, warriors.